Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

CHAPTER 4
Francis Bacon and man’s two-faced kingdom
Antonio Pérez-Ramos
Two closely related but distinct tenets about Bacon’s philosophy have been all
but rejected by contemporary historiography. The first is Bacon’s attachment to
the so-called British empiricist school, that is, the perception of him as the
forerunner or inspirer of thinkers such as Locke, Berkeley or Hume. This
putative lineage has been chiefly the result of nineteenth-century German
scholarship, beginning with Hegel’s own Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der
Philosophie and his trail of imitators and disciples. 1 The glaring fact that Bacon’s
name is hardly (if at all) mentioned by his progeny of would-be co-religionists,
or the serious questioning of the existence of any such entity as the ‘British
empiricist school’, has added further weight to this radical work of revision of
the Lord Chancellor’s significance. 2 The canon of great philosophers is, to a great
extent, a matter of flux, and nationalistic attachments or polarizations should
always pale beside the historically recorded use of the same idiolect in
philosophical matters, as is largely the case with Descartes or Malebranche—
those French ‘rationalists’— and Locke, Berkeley or Hume—those ‘British
empiricists’.
The second tenet that awaits clarification is the exact nature of Bacon’s own
philosophical achievement as regards the emergence of the new scientific
movement—a movement usually associated with the names of Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, Descartes or Newton. This point is extremely difficult to assess,
for it is almost demonstrably true that no such stance or category as our ‘science’
(any more than our ‘scientist’) existed in Bacon’s day and for a long time
thereafter, 3 and hence the web of interpretations must make generous allowances
for an inevitable although self-aware anachronism. Bacon was systematically
deified by the English Royal Society, by eighteenth-century French philosophes
and by eminent Victorian figures such as Herschel or Whewell. Research has
shown, however, that the tenor of such deifications was different in each case;
for example, the last-named Baconsbild was largely prompted by criticism of
supposedly Baconian doctrines coming from David Brewster and other Scottish
scientists and philosophers, as well as from Romantic notions about the role of
‘genius’ in science, hardly compatible with the allegedly egalitarian character of
Bacon’s methodology. 4 Be that as it may, as an example of the sort of cultural